Perry grilled on WHO in Iowa

Iowa caucus-goers are notorious for being informed voters, and POLITICO's Molly Ball reports that a fair amount of information is already spreading around the Hawkeye State:

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Interviewed on Des Moines-based WHO on Monday, Perry took some tough questions from listeners who may all have been working from the same script. The host, Jan Mickelson, said he’s been “deluged” with anti-Perry articles, including 150-plus copies of the same 14-point letter.

Callers to the program confronted Perry with aggressive, statistic-filled queries about his support of an anti-cancer vaccine, his push for toll roads, conspiracy theories about a Nafta superhighway and a pan-American currency, and his attendance at a meeting of the Bilderberg Group.

On the Gardasil vaccine, he gave the impression he long ago realized his error, even though his conversion is a recent development, as the Texas Tribune documented.

“I’m one of the first to say we didn’t approach this issue right at all,” Perry told the caller who asked about the vaccine. “We shouldn’t have done it with an executive order. We should have worked with the legislature.”

Perry reiterated his line that he was motivated by a sincere desire to stop cancer, then said, “That particular issue is one that I readily stand up and say I made a mistake on. I listened to the legislature, they said that was not going to occur, and I agreed with their decision. I don’t always get it right, but I darn sure listen.”

That might come as a surprise to the Texas legislators who have heard Perry insist he was right about the executive order as recently as September 2010.

On the supposed Nafta superhighway, Perry called it “an interesting myth that has been out there a long time.” He joked, “There is a corridor from Mexico to Canada. It’s called I-35. It’s been there a long time.”

Perry went on to defend his failed bid to build a trans-Texas highway and his support for toll roads, saying the alternatives would be to raise taxes, ask Washington for money or wait for “the asphalt fairy” to get needed roads built.

To the caller who asked about the Bilderberg meeting and the Amero, a supposed Euro-like common currency for the Nafta countries, Perry said, “I agree with you, that doesn’t appeal to me at all either.”

He said he was invited to the Bilderberg meeting and attended out of curiosity. “I found it to be an interesting group of people. I have yet to find out why they want to keep it a secret,” he said. “I haven’t been invited back and that was 5 years ago, so I guess I didn’t impress them.”

Perry also gave a spirited defense of Al Gore – at least, the incarnation of Al Gore whose 1988 presidential campaign he chaired in Texas.

“This was Al Gore before he invented the Internet and got to be Mr. Global Warming,” Perry said. Growing up in rural Texas, he said, “I never met a Republican until I was 25. ... In 1988 when you looked at the candidates, Al Gore was the most conservative candidate that was out there.” He pointed to Gore’s support for missile defense.

Once Gore failed to win the nomination, he said, he came to question his partisan identity. “Not only did I vote for George H.W. Bush for president, I switched parties the next year,” Perry said. “When I did that, I made both political parties happy.”